


Strange Children

by ChaoteToTheCore



Category: DragonFable (Video Games)
Genre: Aloof Big Brother, Big Little Brother, Character Study, Disappeared Dad, Gen, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Tropes, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 14:11:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21339538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaoteToTheCore/pseuds/ChaoteToTheCore
Summary: A study on the young characters of DragonFable as they grow up (or, conversely, do not). 1000-1500 words per study.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Strange Children

**Author's Note:**

> Had this in the works for over a year now, I think. Sat down with it, and here we go.
> 
> Relevant Tags: [Katia Danao] [Piotr Danao] [Tomix Danao] [Barvra Danao] [Implied/Referenced Character Death] [Disappeared Dad] [Aloof Big Brother] [Big Little Brother]

Katia remembers pale light glinting off crimson hair and violet eyes. And it's just Tomix, that's what she's told. Her father was long gone, just three kids and an open door locked behind him. And she won't find any pictures of him, that's what she finds. If there were any to start with, Mom and Danyel have long since rid the house of him. And if you still happen to find a heavy, leathery picture they forgot to burn, you don't tell anyone, Katia knows, or there really will be nothing to find.

After all, children hear everything their elders speak, and repeat them more cruelly. And if Katia revels in the thought that if this man with the face of her siblings could leave, then so could she, well. That's between her and her flickering wisps of memory.

Mortem stands with a long, solid memory. Death is the inevitable door to the next, longer life. And, having shed the pesky mortal coil, they remain such fucking gossips that it should be no one's surprise that more than a few end up with dirt in their plasma.

Don't get it wrong, she loves Tomix. She hates how much of _her_ people will overlook to see _him_ where he just… Isn't, anymore. She looks at a crinkled, worn picture, and tries to imagine how much of _Tomix_ they weren't seeing anyway.

The space beneath the Sleeping Brother's bed is spacious and dark, and there's room only for her. Kids whisper about monsters and demons beneath the bed, and in the closet, and sitting at her desk, and she giggles. At least, then, she claimed beneath the bed first. Monsters don't like to share their space, and this one is hers.

Soul Arts are impressive, beautiful, and terrifying. Academy doesn't tell them outright. They say it is dangerous to reach for things beyond their skill, and start everyone on theory she's been taught out of the cradle. She wonders, sometimes, what the other homes of Edelia are like, that these are things she knows so intimately and carries in her bones, yet the others of her year haven't even touched on, have such difficulties grasping it.

Wrapped in blankets, she gripes about the snail pace through the frigid winter, huddled in the creaky rocker by the Sleeping Brother's bed. She thoughtfully squeezes a stuffed moglin, a keepsake from the recent solstice festival. It's stitched with sigils for _'happy dreams,'_ and _'warm friends,'_ and _'peaceful rest.'_ Monsters have no use for it, but the Sleeping Boy might appreciate it.

She ends up sticking a nail through it's throat, pinning it to the wall. Mom will give her a look when she sees, but it's easier than hanging it by cord around the neck, and pinning the cord to the wall.

She's passing by the open door when Tomix catches her eye from where he's sitting inside and he sends her two thumbs-up and twinkling eyes.  
Scoring friends and actual practical Soul Arts lessons is entirely accidental.

See, the first couple years are almost totally theoretical even where it does touch on Soul Arts, and she's never been good at sitting still. So, she signs up to the single art course available for the term.

It is, of fucking course, about flowers. Still, she thinks she can survive, even if some part of her shudders at Mom's chosen reprieve from grief about her sons.

Honestly, the whole affair isn't nearly as bad as she'd worried. It meets in a humid greenhouse where the glass walls are a warm shade of green, and upperclassmen like to meet with friends, in the class or not.

She's the youngest among the handful of students present, though, and something about that makes her the most humorous target to one such group, because they're nodding her way and smirking, and sneering, and laughing behind their hands.

Then one of them picks her up from behind and sits her down with their group.

Apparently, they thought her dark glares at the flowers and the tardy professor were cute. What?

Well, she doesn't understand how it works, but it works in her favor, because they show her how to Weave flowers.

SoulWeave.

Flowers.

And as it turns out, flowers and how they function become infinitely more interesting when you're the one making them, because she has her own garden of sorts. Yes, the early products are somewhat gnarly and twisted and knotted in places, but.

They shine violet and scarlet, and there's a pale light that comes from inside them, and they're hers.

She Weaves a handful into a wreath together and tuck them behind the bear that's still hanging in there.

She's still hanging in there.

She's still hanging in there years later when Tomix is gone for the last time, and the picture in her back pocket burns hot like ice.

She's back from academy, and gonna add a new flower to the wreath, when violet meets gold. They're staring each other down for a bizarre minute before Mom shows up right behind her. She yelps, he yelps, they all yelp 'cause no one knows what to do right then and they're all bundles of nerves held together by anxiety anyway.

He's too weak to sit up much at the start, because it turns out being a living corpse for several years on end is not exactly conducive to moving around, yeah _who fucking knew._

She's sitting in her room, surrounded by her garden that will never die on her. Piotr is… not Tomix. And she's trying to not let that color her, but. It's hard when the both of them see each other and immediately think of him. She doesn't want to overlook who Piotr is.

She hates Tomix for losing himself out there.

She wonders if Danyel is looking for him.

He doesn't like to stay in bed, at all, and she feels that. She thinks Tomix would too, and she carries Piotr to the kitchen, where he sits on the counter.

He mixes his coffee with hot chocolate, the heathen! The menace! The utter genius!

So they drink coffee-cocoa and she shows a brother how to Weave flowers for the first time.

Soon enough, graduation is coming up.

And Piotr is running through the house, and out the door, back against everything she's still stuck with, and the tearing, soft picture burns cold above her breast.

There's a rose that shines like moonstone in her garden of crimson, and it mocks her. She wants to crawl underneath the bed, but a petty worm in her ear doesn't want to protect him from other monsters anymore. She lays on her bed, and pretends she's being buried in soft dirt, covered by flowers that will live and die and whose roots her corpse will feed.

There are six of them in the house, the fullest it's ever been. Her, Mom, and three ghosts that are everything and nothing like each other, arguing every moment they're not laughing. A man sits in the corner, unwelcome but unforgotten, and he smiles at her, violet eyes shining. She sits at the kitchen table drinking bitter tea, and looking bitterly at everything she had never had a chance at having. The picture is warm in her hands, and the man's eyes are too knowing for her taste. 

Her mornings pass straight through nightfall. Her days pass by the ticking seconds now that academy's out forever, and she still can't decide what it is she meant to do eventually.

She lights a candle in the mornings, and it burns through the day. She keeps her window cracked just enough to let the smoke out, and if it decently blankets the smoke of a cigarette, well. That's between her and the shadow staring out from the corner.

There's two of them in the house, except she might just be a ghost herself, and Mom's never in anyways. There are new mothers now, to be helped. There are friend's plots now, to be gardened. There are smaller, happier children now, to be watched over. Spring is in the air, and Mom has never shed her grief so fast.

She lights a candle in the evenings, staring into the crimson-violet flame (like their hair, like their eyes) before she rolls over and pretends she's sleeping. Seems her window is never closed, nowadays. That's fine, the shadow's watching in case

Mom probably knew before she did, and she wants it to not hurt this much. None of her brothers managed a proper goodbye when they left, and she couldn't either right now. Not with her chest about to burst, her nails cutting tiny red moons in her palms, her hair swinging in her eyes and making them water. Not with that shadow with the shape of family watching her.

She pulls down the moglin from the wall, and lights up a smoke to watch it float out the window.

She closes the door to <del>her garden</del> her room, packs up Mom's pie and the thermos of coffee-cocoa off the counter, latches the door behind her, and

Katia 

Walks 

Out.

**Author's Note:**

> Whatcha think? Ya dig? It was only supposed to be 750 words. Yeah. That wasn't happening. Katia has Feelings about things. I have roughly 13 characters lined up already, but I'm accepting suggestions in the comments. Next one up is *drum roll on a cookie tin* Nythera!


End file.
